Procrastination? No, thank you!!!!

1. The Problem


We are all familiar with the situation of letting behind our work - if we had to decide

between finishing an assignment or laying on our comfortable sofa with a cup of coffee

watching our favourite series - we might all agree it is just much more convenient to lay

down and chill over the telly after a long day at uni. But then, before we notice it, the

deadline is behind the corner and we have to hurry and find a way through that mountain

of work piled up as soon as possible if we want to have a successful outcome.

We are joined by stress, anxious feelings and eventually guilt if the outcome was not

as expected.


This commonly known phenomenon is called procrastination. According to researchers

it is the habit of delaying an important task, while we spend time with something less

urgent or favourable, easier activities for our brain. Its result is sadness over unachieved

goals in severe cases even depression, less productivity and even job loss. Often it is

these tasks we do not want to do that we postpone, tasks we struggle to do that

we postpone. Procrastination has a long history. In Ancient Greek it was known

as Akrasia, the “state of acting against your better judgement” (Clear, 2016), doing

one thing conscious of the fact you should be doing something else - loss of self control.


So in order to change this unpleasant behaviour it is important to reflect on the reasons

for procrastination. One of them is “Time inconsistency” (O'Donoghue, 2001), the

tendency to appreciate rewards closer in time more than the ones in future.

This comes along with the idea that we have two selves: the Present Self and

Future Self (Sirois, 2013). Often when we make plans they are dedicated for our

Future Self imagining how we want our life to be in future.

These plans are long term goals. However, it is the Present Self who can take actions

and taking decisions and likes short-term benefit, instant gratification instead of a

long-term reward. It is easier for our Present Self to see value in immediate goals.

When plans are in the future (tomorrow) our brain appreciates long-term gratification

but it values immediate gratification when it comes to the present moment (today).

The Present Self is not motivated by long-term consequences. Therefore it can be

helpful to move future rewards and punishments into the presence, making the

future consequences present ones to not cross our Action Line anymore.


Therefore it is essential to set up a line of rules we will eventually follow

automatically, learn discipline, willpower and most over motivation fighting against

our habit of procrastination. Often it is starting the action which costs the most,

therefore it is crucial to make it easy for the Present Self to start and trust that

motivation will set in.

2. Why the problem is important


After commuting a survey on students from different universities, countries and cultural

backgrounds we found that more than 94% have ever experienced procrastination 

and more than 50% from our sample (35/51) feel very stressful to severely stressed afterwards. 

Around 85% feel stressful and about 2.5% would feel more of a guilty and 

disappointing feeling afterwards instead of the stress. Our participants

fear of becoming lower grades or missing deadlines, losing time and with this not

having time for things that are very important such as learning something else or

working out, regret, having a disorganised busy and tiring life and no management skills,

knowing that the time was not used productively, not achieving goals, becoming less

successful missing job opportunities or even losing the job, wrong decisions,

missing assignments, less quality of work, laziness, mediocre, disappointment or failure.


Further research has shown that procrastination is negatively correlated to your

happiness (Procrastination Research Group). Also in other studies academic

procrastination could be related to test and class anxiety, computational self-concept

and the fear of asking for help (Jiao et al., 2010).


So if students already suffer from these kinds of stressors in an age where they

are setting their paths, winning essential connections and setting life goals,

it will be extremely hard to survive in the world after university, or even,

as our participants have mentioned to manage university. Therefore it is crucial to

learn time management skills as well as self-development and self-awareness in this

period of life and tackle the problem of procrastination in its routes.

3. The target audience and how your project is tailored for them and your

intervention

Our audience are university students from Warwick University as well as other

universities in other countries where we have contacts as we believe procrastination

is a huge problem for university students all over the world and should be fought

against before it is too late.


Our interventions being both, tendable as well as virtual it allows us to reach

students all over the world being globally accessible and convenient.




3.1. Theories - Why we chose this technique?

3.2. 1) Theory of Planned Behavior

In this project, we aim to change one’s behavior using the Theory of Planned

Behaviour (Ajzen,1991). Our project involves changing several of the components

in the theory (which are 1. attitude toward behavior 2. subjective norm,

and 3. intention) respectively to achieve change in behavior. The following parts

will demonstrate how we used different persuasive techniques to change the

components.





2) Changing attitude toward behavior


Firstly, we aim to change one’s attitude toward procrastination. To be specific,

we hope to motivate the participants and provide them with methods to deal with

procrastination that they will perceive as trustworthy.

According to the Elaboration-Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacippo,1986),

one’s attitude can be persuaded via the central route or peripheral route
depending on one’s ability and motivation to pay attention. As one of the major

causes of procrastination is the lack of motivation (Brownlow & Reasinger, 2000),

we focus more on using the peripheral route of persuasion in our poster.

Techniques of peripheral route of persuasion used includes:

1. Colour


Colour can affect one’s emotion and behavioral intentions (Singh, 2006).

Therefore, we have intentionally employed specific colours in our poster to

serve this function. For example, the colour red is implicitly associated with danger

(Pravossoudovitch et al., 2014), thus we have used red colour in our topic to convey

the danger of procrastination. Similarly, as the colour green can give a calm feeling

(Singh, 2006), we used the green colour at the background so as to associate the methods

the solve procrastination with calmness.




2. Similarity effect


According to the Yale attitude change approach (Hovland,1953), the similarity

between the speaker and the recipient can affect persuasiveness of the message due

to the similarity effect. In our poster, we used the sentence “We’ve all been there before”

to suggest that the source has similar experience of procrastination as the recipient,

which targets to enhances psychological attachment with the participants and enhance

their trust to our methods.




3. The above-average effect


The Better-Than-Average Effect suggest that people evaluate themselves as

better than average peers. Motivation is therefore enhanced when “threatening”

one’s feelings of self-worth or superiority against others. In our poster, we suggested

that our methods to deal with procrastination can be achieved “even by a primary

schooler”. So that the audience, instead of simply going through the message without

much processing, are motivated to achieve such simple things that can easily be

achieved by people they perceived as inferior.





3) Changing subjective norms


Secondly, we aim to change the perceived norms of the participants. According to the

Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986), people learn by observing others, and

constantly comparing self to surroundings. According to our questionnaire, many of

participants are not motivated to improve their problem of procrastination (even though

they perceive the problem as serious) as many people around them are also procrastinating.

Procrastination, in their view, is a norm that everyone is facing, thus lack the pressure and

peer support to change their action. Therefore, we aim to change this subjective norm by

creating a WhatsApp support group and gather people who would like to solve their

procrastination problem. Thus, we change the norm from “everybody procrastinate” to

“people are changing to stop procrastination”.









4) Changing intention


As Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) remarked “Goal intentions are not always successfully

translated into behaviour because merely making a commitment to attain a goal does not

necessarily prepare people for dealing effectively with self-regulatory problems in goal

striving”. Therefore, in our project, we have used some behavioural change techniques to 1)

facilitate the translation from intention to behaviour, and 2) dealing with the self-regulatory

problems in goal striving.


Firstly, we used Gollwitzer & Sheeran’s implementation intentions plan to

facilitate the translation from intention to behaviour. We requested our participants to

upload their to-do list with implementation intention plan (listing when and how they will

achieve the tasks in their to-do list) in the group every day. By listing their implementation

intentions, it is believed the act will be more automatic by increasing availability

(Gollwitzer & Sheera, 2006).



In addition, we employed the power of social pressure to deal with the self-regulatory

problems and in turn provoke participants to really take action. Social pressures are exerted

on an individual resulting from their perceptions of how others think of them

(Morris et al, 2012). One is inclined to comply with these expectation and act accordingly.

In our project, we would follow-up the participants’ actions by asking if they have achieved

their plans in the group publicly. It was hoped that as the participants know they are

publicly monitored, in order to comply with the social expectations and not to “lose face”,

they were more provoked to take action.

Looking into the Future:

There’s several other tools we could employ in the future on this particular topic about

helping people stop procrastinating.


-An app could be developed to deal with the problem. The app would function as a

media block. When activated, this particular application would prevent its user to go on

other social media or entertaining applications. The user can set a particular time that he/she

wants to do work without electronic devices/social media distractions and then the devices

they use would not allow them to do so in this said time period. This app is very similar to

some existing technologies. However, most of these existing apps could be shut down

forcibly through a reboot of the device. Hence, maybe during the development of

this new app or other similar apps, this design could be fixed: unless the time is up,

the app would not allow its user to access those applications mentioned above.



-A Buddy Program could also be deployed in the future. We could pair some of the

students together, monitoring each other. Most of time, when there’s someone monitoring

people and check up on their progress of achieving their goals, individuals would more likely

to do the work. The group chat in our little experiment for instance, it checks up on individuals’

processes on goal achieving, which is quite helpful. Not to mention one would feel bad if

his/her partner did the work but he/she didn’t. This program could have some disadvantages.

For instance, it is possible that the two partners could be equally procrastinated and they just

hang out instead of doing works. Therefore, a cooperation with school could be helpful.

For example, if this group did what they were told, they would be rewarded with a small

amount of extra credits that could apply to any one of their courses (of course if the school

allows this to happen). I am only using school scenario as an example. If it is in a company,

the reward could be some monthly bonus (small amount). The reward would not be grand

since they are only doing their work, but a positive reinforcement could definitely help

people to get used to dealing with procrastination.

References


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